YouTube to test Beta Version of TikTok rival in India

YouTube is set to test a beta version of the new TikTok rival, YouTube Shorts, in India. The new platform will limit videos to 15 seconds. It will feature creator tools which are very much similar to TikTok.

YouTube Shorts is available for Android phones and will be expanded to iPhone and other countries soon. An official statement said music for these videos will be available through in-product music picker feature. The picker currently has 100,000s of tracks. YouTube is working with music artists, labels and publishers to make more of their content available to continue expanding. The platform will feature hundreds of thousands of tracks from partners T-Series and Believe Digital.

In June, following the clash between Chinese and Indian troops in Galwan Valley in Ladakh along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), India banned TikTok and 58 other Chinese apps. India was TikTok’s biggest foreign market with over 100 million users. Google took this opportunity to fill up the vaccum with YouTube Shorts. The new app allows users to upload 15-second short-form videos using a set of creator tools, including a multi-segment camera, speed controls and a timer with a countdown feature. The multi-segment camera allows users to string together multiple video clips into one short clip. Other controls enable creators to be more creative than if they simply pressed a record button. The video streaming giant will also be launching a new watch experience that will let users swipe through YouTube Shorts vertically. The company had already added a new row on the YouTube homepage for watching short videos, the new watch experience will make it easier to watch content and discover new short videos too.

There are other apps also vying to catch TikTok’s users. Facebook-owned Instagram had also launched a new video-music remix feature called Reels. With Reels, users can make 15-second video clips set to music and share them as Stories.